If your digital marketing agency has recommended starting a blog for your dental clinic, it's understandable that you might be hesitant. Should you really be spending your precious time thinking up topics for people to read about?
You don't have to write the blog yourself, but by publishing regular content to your website or third-party sites and promoting it on social media, you can steadily grow your website, your reputation and your local business.
Here are the three main reasons why content marketing can benefit your practice.
1. Improve SEO
At the most basic level, publishing blog posts adds more pages to your website and ensures you're publishing new content regularly, both of which help to boost your search engine ranking. But Google cares about quality as well as quantity.
Well-optimized blogs can help you to rank highly for your target keywords, especially for local searches. However, forcing keywords into pages at a cost to readability will make your site suffer, so it's important to get the balance right and create content that people will actually enjoy reading.
Publishing content to third-party blogs and websites (blogger outreach) can also give a boost to your own page ranking, as long as you include a link back to your dental website.
2. Establish authority and trust
Blog posts aren't just content for the sake of content. Well-written posts that offer value to readers reflect well on your dentists and your practice, as you can demonstrate your knowledge of industry topics, answer the questions people are asking, or voice your opinion on current industry news.
A blog can be a bit more personal than the rest of your website, so it's also a chance to show your personality to your patients. This gives your practice a more human touch and can build trust and familiarity.
3. Reach a wider audience
Social media marketing helps you to reach more people in your local area, and blogging gives you a steady stream of content to share with your followers on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.
Not only will your clinic stay in their thoughts, but if you publish interesting and relevant articles, readers are likely to share this with other people they know, helping to get your name out there as local experts.
How do I get started?
Starting a blog from scratch can be a daunting prospect, especially if you don't consider yourself a writer. A successful blog needs to be updated frequently with high-quality content about a range of topics. This requires a level of writing skill and a lot of time for research and content creation that you might not want to spare yourself.
While these are concerns for any industry, dentists also have to follow strict marketing guidelines or face paying fines or even losing their licence. This can be solved by hiring a digital marketing agency or copywriter with specialist knowledge and experience in writing for the dental industry.
If you need help writing your dental blog or creating your whole website, Quantum can take care of it. We've been working with dental clinics in Australia and overseas for 15 years, so we know how to comply with advertising guidelines while helping dentists to grow their local businesses and see strong returns on their marketing investment.
Get in touch today to find out how we can help you.
